BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Three University at Buffalo professors have
been elected fellows of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general
scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

The fellows, among 702 chosen by AAAS this year, were listed in
Friday's edition of Science. They are:

-- Surajit Sen, PhD, professor of physics, College of Arts and
Sciences.

"We are very proud of the individual achievements of each of
these outstanding faculty members. Professors Alexandridis, Morris
and Sen truly represent the excellence of UB's faculty," UB Provost
Charles Zukoski said. "We are tremendously proud of their
accomplishments and congratulate them on this much-deserved
national recognition."

Morris was chosen for "distinguished contributions to the field
of pharmaceutical sciences in the area of membrane transport and
its influence on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of
drugs."

Sen received the distinction "for pioneering research on
solitary waves and their collisions in granular media and for
sustained outstanding service and leadership in international
physics."

The fellows will be presented with a certificate and rosette pin
at AAAS's annual meeting Feb. 16 in Boston.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is a nonprofit organization that includes
261 affiliated societies and academies of science. Its mission is
to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in
science policy, international programs, science education and
more.

Additional information on UB's three newest fellows is
below.

Paschalis Alexandridis

A chemical engineer specializing in soft materials and
nanotechnology, Alexandridis has been a UB faculty member since
1997.

Alexandridis has co-authored more than 120 journal articles and
60 conference proceedings, edited two books and given more 130
lectures worldwide. He is co-inventor of 10 patents on
pharmaceutical formulations, superabsorbent polymers, and metallic
and semiconductor nanomaterials. His work has been cited roughly
7,500 times.

His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation,
National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Standards
and Technology, the Petroleum Research Fund, the Gulf of Mexico
Research Initiative, Dow Chemical, Bausch & Lomb and Kao
Corp.

Named an honorary adjunct professor at Beijing University of
Chemical Technology in 2011, Alexandridis was also a guest
researcher at the Tokyo University of Science and the Fritz-Haber
Institute of the Max-Planck Society in Germany.

He served on journal editorial boards and proposal review
panels, chaired several technical conferences and symposia and was
elected chairperson of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers
(AIChE) Area 1C: "Interfacial Phenomena" and an executive board
member of the AIChE Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum.

Alexandridis is the founding co-director of UB's materials
science and engineering program and is the School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences acting associate dean for research and
graduate education. A former director of graduate studies in
chemical engineering, he has mentored more than 45 undergraduate
and 45 graduate students. He received the American Society for
Engineering Education Dow Outstanding New Faculty Award (1999), the
SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2006) and the
UB Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award (2012).

Alexandridis graduated from National Technical University in
Athens, Greece, and earned master's and doctoral degrees in
chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He did postdoctoral research at Lund University,
Sweden.

Marilyn Morris

A pharmaceutical scientist and the author of more than 160
peer-reviewed scientific papers, Morris joined UB's faculty in
1985.

Her research focuses on the membrane transport of drugs and the
use of membrane transporters as therapeutic targets. She has
published extensively on renal transport, hepatobiliary transport
and hepatic clearance models, ATP-dependent binding cassette and
monocarboxylate transporters.

Currently, she is examining the pharmacokinetics and
pharmacodynamics of dietary components, flavonoids and organic
isothiocyanates, with an emphasis on their potential for transport
and metabolic drug interactions and their role in cancer therapy
and chemoprevention.

Morris is also evaluating the toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics
of the drug of abuse gamma-hydroxybutyric acid and the use of
monocarboxylate drug transporters as therapeutic targets for the
treatment of overdoses. The research is funded by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse.

Her research has also been funded by the National Institutes of
Health, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation,
Susan G. Komen for the Cure (formerly, the Susan G. Komen Breast
Cancer Foundation), the National Cancer Institute and other
agencies. She served on grant review committees for all of the
above organizations.

Morris has been or is currently an advisor to 10 postdoctoral
scholars, 25 Ph.D. students, 11 master's students, 6
bachelor/master's students, as well as Pharm.D., undergraduate and
high school students.

She is a fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical
Scientists (AAPS) and serves as AAPS president-elect. She also
serves on editorial boards for the Journal of Pharmaceutical
Science, Pharmaceutical Research, Biopharmaceutics and Drug
Disposition and as associate editor of the AAPS Journal.

Morris is an advisory committee member for the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. A
2006 recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award in Excellence for
Research and Creative Activity, she also served as associate dean
for graduate and postgraduate education in UB's Graduate School
from 2006-2012 where she established the Office of Postdoctoral
Scholars.

She received a bachelor of science in pharmacy from the
University of Manitoba, Canada, and a master's of science in
pharmacology from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She was an
assistant professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada,
before earning a PhD from UB. She was a Medical Research Council
Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada, prior to working at
UB.

Surajit Sen

A UB faculty member since 1994, Sen is an expert on
non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and nonlinear many-body
physics. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked mostly on mechanical
energy propagation in discrete materials.

He has made major contributions to the understanding of
propagating energy bundles -- or solitary waves -- in discrete
systems, such as granular systems. His research also includes the
acoustic detection of land mines, designing scalable shock
absorption systems and energy harvesting systems. He developed
exact solutions to quantum dynamical problems in magnetism and is
one of a few physicists engaged in the emerging area of
sociophysics by modeling battles and terrorist attacks using
physics-based approaches.

Sen was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008
for his discovery of how solitary waves break and secondary
solitary waves form in granular media; his leadership in organizing
forums to represent and recognize physicists from India; and for
developing science educational materials for rural middle-school
children in India and developing nations. Other honors include a
Theoretical Physics Seminar Circuit Lectureship of the Government
of India and the SUNY Chancellor's First Patent Award. He also was
named one of the top 100 innovators of Western New York.

His research has been supported by, among others, the National
Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office.

He is an editor of the International Journal of Modern Physics B
and of Modern Physics Letters B. He served as president of the
American chapter of the Indian Physics Association for two terms
from 2005-11, and was elected a member of the American Physical
Society Council's Committee on International Scientific
Affairs.

Sen has been on research visits to the California Institute of
Technology; the University of California, San Diego; Duke
University; Asia-Pacific Centre for Theoretical Physics and Seoul
National University, both in Seoul, Korea; the University of
Santiago, Chile; the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore,
India; the University of Paris, France and elsewhere.

He has co-authored more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, three
books, holds a U.S. patent and has given roughly 130 lectures
worldwide. He has mentored 47 students, including four postdoctoral
fellows, 13 doctoral students, two master's students, 24
undergraduates and four high school students. In addition to
teaching various physics courses, he often offers a discovery
seminar on issues relevant to poor rural areas of the world.

Sen did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota and
Michigan State University. He earned a bachelor of science with
honors in physics at Presidency College, University of Calcutta,
India, in 1982, and a PhD in physics from the University of Georgia
in 1990 with a thesis on the exact solutions to spin dynamics in D
dimensional Ising models under the supervision of M. Howard
Lee.